Throughout Britain, practitioners interested in increasing the overall safety of all road users and in particular of children have been looking for different ways to bring home this message and to make everyone aware of their responsibilities and rights. As a result of these needs and to make full use of the opportunity of explaining to people the concepts of the danger reduction and its practical implications, Leeds City Council, in collaboration with Leeds and Leeds Metropolitan Universities, has instigated a set of interventions in a selection of local primary schools. These interventions, although initially aimed at the school children, were aimed and programmed so as to involve parents and then extend to the wider community. The work itself has covered three main areas: Moving about safely, Transport and travel and Danger reduction. Since this has been an innovative scheme it has meant the instigation of all traffic education together with the development of new material to cover this new approach. In order to assess the effectiveness of this approach a series of questionnaires and structured interviews with children, teachers and parents have been carried out on a "before and after" basis. In addition, similar analysis has been carried out within control schools so as to obtain fair comparisons. The results from this analysis are presented in the paper and the full consequences of the work assessed.
Samenvatting